What a two weeks it’s been. Something happened that has been simmering for a while. The API market exploded. Intel bought Mashery for more than $180 million and CA acquired Layer 7. 3Scale received a new $4.5 million round of funding from Javelin Ventures. Mulesoft acquired Programmable Web. And then Facebook jumped in and bought Parse.

The acquisitions and funding point to a maturing market that is reflected in the ubiquity of APIs across the application landscape. It’s not a new market by any means. The space is filled with companies that have leveraged the API build out that has happened over the past several years. Instead this is an inflection point. There are more than 30,000 APIs, according to Programmable Web, the leading API directory and blog. Javelin Ventures Managing Director Noah Doyle said to me in an interview that analysts see the API market growing five to ten times over the next five years.

With that scaling in number of APIs comes a virtuous circle for the developers that build compelling apps and APIs. The APIs extend the apps reach as they become part of distributed data network. As more people use the APIs so the app developer generates more data. As the data increases in scope, often the service will become an API.

Facebook needs new streams of data to keep rolling out new digital products. Back end as a service providers like Parse provide SDKs and APIs that give developers access to infrastructure for storing basic data types, locations and photos. How Facebook uses this data is a question mark. But regardless, Pare serves as a constant replenishing source, nourished by the apps on the Parse platform that use APIs. Facebook now will decide how to package and segment that data to push more relevant advertising to its 1 billion users.

APIs Are Like Glue

APIs will be the glue to the Internet, said Programmable Web Founder John Musser. Musser, like Doyle, sees a new generation of APIs emerging that are fueled by demand, triggered by mobile devices, which serve in many respects as the new client/servers. Apps are hosted on cloud services and distributed across mobile devices that read and write data, sending and receiving information, connecting via APIs.

In the first generation, Mashery and companies like Apigee pioneered the API management space. Twitter and other web companies emerged in the second generation. In the third wave, enterprise vendors, like Intel and CA, are recognizing this big movement and entering the market to connect hardware and software systems.

Now the API movement is headed below the application to the machine level, Doyle said. It’s at this level that we see the emergence of the Internet of Things. Here, everything become programmable, able to send and receive data, integrate it and trigger actions.

3Scale provides the management of the API so developers can build logic on top, Doyle said. The company helps developers manage APIs out of the box so they can simply add data sets or services without needing to hand stitch things together.

The API Economy

The surge of activity marks a symbolic point for the API Economy, a term ApigeeVice President of Strategy Sam Ramji helped coin. He said in an email that this past week may have doubled the size of the audience paying attention to APIs and API infrastructure. “If a company doesn’t have an API, and their CIO or CTO reads about the news, they will be asking themselves ‘why don’t we?’” 

And it will be easier for them to build APIs with services popping up like Mashape and Webshell. Doyle spent three years at Google after the company acquired Keyhole, the startup he founded. At Google, Doyle helped develop Google Earth and worked on Google Maps.

“We exposed maps as a lightweight JavaScript,” Doyle said. “We thought of it as an embed code in a way. We thought it would be cool and great but were  shocked how quick it took off.”

It was the ease of use that made Google Maps accessible, Doyle said. Today, best practices are getting built-in so it is easy for the developer to build out sophisticated apps.

Complexity Is Inevitable

But it’s not all so simple. Complications await as development becomes ever more distributed across multiple APIs. It’s a hole MuleSoft sees it can help fill with its APIhub.

As I wrote last week, for MuleSoft, the Programmable Web deal provides a vehicle for it to offer what it calls a GitHub for APIs that will integrate its APIhub with Programmable Web’s API database and rich editorial focus on the correlating market space. For Programmable Web, it provides a stable home, a place where it can extend its API database to a community that can build out apps using the MuleSoft APIhub platform. It’s this integrated platform that the company expects to provide the guide and the community collaboration to make APIs easier to fit together.

Tasktop Technologies, an application lifecycle management (ALM) integrator, has launched an open-source effort called Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) that would link the disparate tools in the software lifecycle management process. The new initiative is called M4 and is part of an open-source project under Eclipse-Mylyn. 

SLI is what Tasktop CEO and co-founder Mik Kersten calls an underlying service that acts as a universal linked data message bus that allows for real-time synchronization between different tools so people can immediately discuss problems with the code as they surface.  It’s these underlying integration platforms that will emerge as the API economy develops. Acquisitions and funding over these past two weeks signal the need to manage this complexity so it really is easier to build out apps that are as connected to our mobile devices as to the rest of the things in our lives.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

People won’t stop talking about Google Glass, and rightfully so. Ever since the epic parachute-hangout demo, the Valley has been buzzing about the future coming of what is arguably one of the biggest potential advancements in computer interfaces since the iPhone. Lately, the buzz has been bubbling as Google employees, early adopters (Scoble just posted his detailed review), tech bloggers, and contest winners have started to receive their glasses, combined with heavy, consumer-focused advertising, a dedicated fund pairing Google’s own venture arm with two of Sand Hill’s most storied venture capital firms. It’s gotten so much ink that new monikers have emerged, such as “Glasshole,” and the phenomenon was hilariously lambasted in the latest installment of “Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley,” a Tumblr devoted to over-the-top yet oftentimes valid tech-focused satire.

There’s so much to investigate with respect to Glass, so in this week’s “Iterations” column, I’m just going to focus on the early-stage investment side. There’s no shortage of opinions here. My two cents is while Google is investing lots of dollars into a consumer-focused campaign, Glass will not initially be a device that the majority people will want, need, or be able to afford (unlike a cell phone), even when the price comes down. It will also be a very different type of interface. That said, it’s no matter, because the commercial applications for Glass are boundless: Imagine a bunch of kids on a school trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, able to press on Glass and learn more about the sea life they see in the tanks. Well, I don’t even know if that’s possible on a watery service, but regardless…instead, I emailed a handful of experienced technology investors I know well to briefly weigh on how they think of Glass as an interface to invest in and around. Below is a collection of the answers I received, edited briefly:

Bill Lee is a serial entrepreneur, currently working on a mobile app, Twist. He’s also a well-known angel investor and LP in the Valley, and also sat down with me “In The Studio” earlier this year:

I’m skeptical that GG will get mass adoption. As someone that grew up with glasses, I couldn’t wait until I got LASIK/corrective eye surgery. I just can’t see myself wearing glasses again voluntarily (no disrespect to fashion icon NBA basketball players such as Lebron James wearing hipster glasses). While I don’t think there will be mass adoption, I do see several niche markets springing up. For example, people that really need glasses (elderly, jewelers, surgeons, etc.) should derive tremendous benefit from GG applications. I haven’t seen any GG pitches yet, but I expect to see several this year. As with all investments, I’d put more emphasis on finding the right team than needing to be the first in the space. If GG takes off, there should be ample room for a great team to innovate even if they aren’t first. – Bill Lee

Matt Ocko is a partner with Data Collective and one of the most selective seed-stage technology investors in the Valley:

In five years, it’s not about Google Glass per se, which is a brave but still early evolutionary step, but how dependent everyday people will become on certain types of ubiquitous but non-intrusive tech.  Specifically, tech that has to be amazingly powerful and sophisticated to achieve that very non-intrusiveness in the first place. A great example – and I think, the more interesting story — is speech recognition, which of necessity is a big part of Glass. Whether it’s in every car via a service arrangement with Apple and Google competing with each other to be the backend, or in lightweight smart earphones that can be left in for one or more days, or in Google Glass-like glasses, always-on listening with deep, smart taxonomies will be a fact of life – i.e., near total adoption by the middle classes of the G7 and beyond.

As an investor, I am looking for companies that presume the success of this kind of technology, then look at how they can apply equally profound compute and algorithmic innovations to transform different industries. For example, what do certain medical practices look like when the EMR/EHR platform is listening in on doctors and nurses, and has something like IBM Watson behind it, watching for missed diagnoses (e.g., sepsis in a hospital), mis-medication, or even malpractice? What does CRM look like when a salesperson’s or customer service rep’s efficacy can be analyzed in real-time from their conversation with a customer?  If the video appurtenance to GG’s “speech recognition delivery platform” (my own biased view) turns out to be important, then machine vision becomes the next huge ubiquitous technology (where Google already has an early lead), and we ask questions like “what does the advertising targeting chain look like when every product in a store is lit up under live video scrutiny by the analog of Google Goggles?” I’m indifferent to whether other hardware makers develop their own products, but a) I think they have to, if they want to be part of the “always listening” value chain, whether or not there is a screen attached (the GG incarnation) and b) I want them to, so that a “thousand flowers bloom” and there is innovation and consumer choice that drives rapid adoption. – Matt Ocko

Manu Kumar is a former entrepreneur and now microVC with K9 Ventures focusing on deeper technology investments, and about a year ago, hung out with me In the Studio to discuss mobile camera imaging:

While I was a student at Carnegie Mellon, there was a lot of work on “wearable computing” back then. For instance, check out VuMan from 1997 and Navigator. I cite these to show that the concept of Google Glass as a wearable computer is nothing new. It’s been around for well over a decade. What has changed is that now the technology has become advanced enough to make it a *lot* smaller, *somewhat* less dorky, and by means of being connected, hugely more information-rich.

I believe that Google Glass will be a long-term platform. The initial consumer adoption will be by early adopters — by a lot of us Silicon Valley geek-types who want to play with the tech. However, I suspect that the real adoption will come from more commercial applications — people who need to work with their hands and can benefit from instant access to information. Police cars are equipped with computers to provide cops with access to information on the road. You can imagine a Google Glass app designed specifically for police, fire, EMS etc. Likewise in construction, maintenance, inspection, lots of tasks become orders of magnitude more efficient, when imagined with Glass as the underlying platform.

As you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time on computer vision, cameras, etc. Glass presents the first really usable Augmented Reality platform, because it’s the first time that you can get a true overlay on reality, without having to be walking with your phone/tablet in front of your face!  I’ve already had conversation with some companies who are doing advance computer vision and augmented reality work where they could potentially do interesting things with Google Glass. However, since it’s been in such limited distribution so far, it won’t be until they get their hands on it and can evaluate what it’s capable of, before we can really talk more concretely about it. In other words, I’m very curious to see the potential of Glass as a platform for new products/companies, but don’t have enough information to act on it just yet. – Manu Kumar

Albert Wenger is a partner with Union Square Ventures:

I am quite optimistic about the long term potential of augmented reality. But I question whether now is the right time for a top down adoption strategy with a polished consumer product. It seems to me that we are at the hacker and early adopter stage instead. By going with an immediate mass market strategy and embracing celebrities I think Google is taking a very big gamble. Let’s keep in mind that the iPhone was far from the first smart phone. A lot of software and application tinkering had happened on Blackberries and other predecessors most of which had niche use cases. I often find myself saying to entrepreneurs that you “can’t push on a string.” It may be a tired cliche but it seems highly relevant for consumer products. If people aren’t ready for it, no amount of hype or spending will make the product stick. The people who are ready now are the hackers and tinkerers. So why not embrace them instead? (reproduced from Albert’s blog, with permission). -Albert Wenger

Hemant Taneja is a partner with General Catalyst:

Seeing a device from your childhood science fiction novels become reality is one of the most exciting moments for any of us who work in tech. However, the commercial success of Google Glass relies on three crucial parts. First, consumers must love the hardware. The product has to be intuitive and function seamlessly with everyday activities. Second, Google must develop a high-quality API that allows developers the freedom to create top-notch software and fully leverage Glass’ capabilities. Third, Google has to ensure that the best applications are discovered by users. All three of these areas are non-trivial and will take more time, and users should be prepared for the day when hype meets reality. Google Glass is an entirely new form factor, and thus there will be a longer uptake time than we have just saw the past two years with tablets. Given that dynamic, we are going to look for simple but effective applications that can can go mainstream as adoption of the Glass product increases with Google’s future iterations of the product. -Hemant Taneja

Rohit Sharma is a venture partner with True Ventures:

As an investor, the most exciting possibility about Google Glass is the behavior change it might produce. If Glass or other devices begin to connect and share meaningful information about consumers and their digitized presence, it opens up a massive new arena for applications. Another possibility is that Glass becomes the hub for multiple devices (FitBits, bloodchem sensors, watches, etc.) and becomes an additional app platform connected to but independent of smartphones/tablets. I don’t know if consumers will adopt it, that’s the biggest “if” — not the technology or the devices. There’s plenty of time for investing in a post-Glass reality if adoption happens. I haven’t seen any pitches yet but also haven’t been looking yet, as I’m much more interested in the behavior change it induces and provokes. -Rohit Sharma

After 24 hours of staring at their screens, the teams that participated in our Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon have now finished their projects and are currently presenting them onstage. With more than 160 hacks, there are far too many cool ones to write about, but one that stood out to me was NewsRel, an iPad-based news app that uses machine-learning techniques to understand how news stories relate to one other. The app uses Google Maps as its main interface and automatically decides which location is most appropriate for any given story.

The app currently uses Reuters‘ RSS feed and analyzes the stories, looking for clusters of related stories and then puts them on the map. Say you are looking at a story about the Boston Marathon bombings. The app, of course, will show you a number of news stories about it clustered around Boston, then maybe something about the president’s comments about it from Washington and another article that relates it to the massacre during the Munich Olympics in 1972.

In addition to this, the team built an algorithm that picks the most important sentences from each story to summarize it for you.

As you scroll through the stories, the app always recalculates the related stories on the fly, too, which makes for a pretty interesting news-reading experience. Besides the map, the team also decided to develop the user interface around gestures, so you swipe down to read the full story on the news service’s webpage and you can swipe left and right to scroll from one story to the next

The team members have a background in machine learning and iOS engineering. They met during their undergrad studies a few years ago and decided to team up for the hackathon. They told me that they plan to keep working on the app and release it in the near future.

Once you’ve had a few drinks at a bar it’s easy to let loose and blow off steam. Unfortunately, while you’re having fun, you could end up annoying others around you, namely the staff at the venue you’re at. By acting like a fool, you’re jeopardizing your future visits, since bartenders tend to remember who was a jerk and who was a great customer.

A project at our Disrupt Hackathon called “Bar Power” is an app that will remind you to “not be a douchebag.” It’s somewhat of a game, walking you through nice things to do when you enter a bar. For example, the app will suggest that you say “hi” to the bartender and introduce yourself. If you do it and mark it down in the app, you get some karma points.

The really interesting part of the app comes into play when you’ve done something wrong. Did you drop a glass? Fall down? Mark that down, too. Naturally, you’ll lose those karma points that you gained by being the perfect customer.

I chatted with the team who built it, Patricia Ju and Chris Baily, and they discussed their reasons for creating Bar Power, mostly stemming from Baily’s professional experience in the bar scene. While Bar Power might complicate what you’ve set out to do, which is drink, it is a good way to have a little fun and learn how to be a better customer. Ju explained: “It’s so much better to go out to places where you know people. Bartenders gave us feedback and that helped us make Bar Power’s rules.

Once you’re in the app, you select the bar that you’re at and then start doing the nice things that it tells you to do. Slip up? Check that off on the list, too:

The map below will track how you’re doing throughout the city, alerting you to areas that you should avoid since you were a freaking jerk the night before:

As Baily explained, if people understand what to do and what not to do from the bartender community, their experience will be a better one. If the team can build relationships with venues to get them to interact with customers through the app, this could be a neat rating system that goes both ways, à la apps like Lyft and Uber. It sounds like Bar Power has potential past being “just a hack,” and I know that I’d use it.

Some of the creators of TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon project Espace are still learning to code, and this was the perfect event at which to hone their skills. The six-person team designed a site this weekend to connect meetup groups with venues offering space where events can be hosted. Organizers and venue owners use the site to sign up and list their needs or what they have to offer, respectively. Espace then helps to put them in touch to broker the deal.

The idea resonated with two of the group’s members in particular: husband and wife team Jamal and Felicia O’Garro. Both started learning Ruby recently, and today host a meetup group of their own. This group, started in January, is focused on helping others who are also learning to code, by offering training classes and coffee-and-coding sessions. The group meets Sundays at New York-based co-working space, Alley NYC, and despite its young age, it has already grown to around 550 members, with 30 or so showing up at each weekly session.

Others working on the Espace team this weekend include David Lau, Adam Waxman, Cavaughn Noel and Linda Peng. The site uses the Twilio API, which gives both the vendor owner and meetup organizer a virtual number that they can use to connect to discuss the details of the group’s meeting space needs. Asked if meeting organizers were really all that concerned about sharing their real phone numbers with venue owners, Jamal admitted that he was mainly interested in playing around with the Twilio API.

Jamal may be a newer coder, but he’s already building software for another area startup, CommonBond a recently seed-funded company that connects student borrowers with alumni to crowdsource funding of student loans. Whether or not Espace continues after this weekend is unknown: Jamal is turning into a hackathon junkie, it seems – this is his third in just a few months’ time, he says.

Espace onstage:

After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet.

Kolodny and Lin already knew each other before the event. They met Falletti at the Manhattan Center. As they already knew what they wanted to work on, they started developing right away.

Over the past 24 hours, the team has not slept a single minute to deliver this hack built in Python using the Django framework. They certainly needed Red Bull and coffee to keep going during the wee hours of the night. Yet, The team had a great time and will certainly take part in other hackathons.

When asked whether Kolodny will hang out later with fiends that were not at the hackathon, he said that he wouldn’t use the service this afternoon. It’s time for them to celebrate, or more probably to finally rest.

Watch the onstage demo:

One of the hacks at Disrupt NY’s Hackathon this year employed hardware startup Leap Motion’s new 3D gesture controller, which unfortunately just ran into a delay. Leap Motion’s issues aside, this project, the combined effort of Chao Huang, Cedrich Pinson and Jorge Martinez, brings a Facebook Home-style experience to the desktop.

With “Leap in Time,” Leap Motion is used to navigate through a Facebook timeline via hand gestures that are intended to be as natural and intuitive as possible. You swipe left and right to go through photos and posts, and there’s inertia built-in to make it feel even more immersive. Then there’s a motion to pause and focus on a particular piece of content, with a palm outward gesture, and you can simply make a thumbs up to like a post.

Working with the Leap Motion was fairly simple, the team said, but does seem to experience difficulty with some environment issues like changing lighting conditions. It’s also crucial to maker sure that the Leap Motion app you’re building is cued to pay attention to certain things at certain times and to ignore specific motions in different settings. You have to cue the app to not pay attention to sideways hand waving when you want it to be able to recognize the thumbs up, for instance.

The hack was surprisingly smooth given that it was built in fewer than 24 hours, and Huang said there’s plenty more they could do given more time, but they wanted to focus on what they considered the core Facebook experience. The project is also reminiscent of a recent concept design making the rounds of a Facebook Home app for Windows 8.

Leap in Time is a simple enough implementation of Leap Motion, but it does act as a pretty solid example of how gesture control might actually work well for navigating apps and software that we use every day. I know that Leap Motion is eager to get as much software as possible into Airspace, the app store for the controller, but this team said they weren’t sure whether they’d actually pursue this any further.

While possessing a flexible range of streaming options, Denon’s Cocoon ranks toward the bottom of the AirPlay pile and carries too high a price.

Boundary‘s application performance monitoring technology is now integrated into Splunk‘s enterprise platform, providing a window into apps that increasingly are distributed across cloud and on-premise virtualized environments.

Boundary provides a snapshot every second of the app’s topology. That data now appears in Splunk Enterprise, which collects and indexes machine data such as logs, events and performance metrics from all tiers of the technology stack.

By combining the two apps, IT personnel can determine the health of the app and how it is behaving across a distributed environment, which increasingly common in today’s market. The app can be viewed in a virtualized or cloud environment, reflecting the need to monitor apps as data flows on and off premise. The new integration is available through Splunk’s community website Splunkbase.

Here’s how it works. Splunk real-time alerts are tagged as annotations in Boundary’s time-series graphs. Customers can then correlate alerts against application flow and performance data.

Gary Read, CEO at Boundary, said in an interview that it is becoming increasingly complex to determine the root cause for why an app is not performing well. “Brownouts” are increasingly becoming an issue. Apps are so distributed that they never actually go down. But they can get sluggish. The challenge is finding out why they are not performing well. To do that IT has to get a holistic view of the app. That means knowing how the app is doing on a contextual basis.

It’s this problem that is leading to a new breed of performance stacks that is managed virtually through providers such as Splunk, Boundary or New Relic, which looks at an app’s code. These are different from the stacks that IT would once build on-premise to manage client/server applications with software from companies such as CA or HP.

In case you can’t wait for Jony Ive to give iOS a complete revamp, there’s Classic Note, an app that will bring back a bit of the Woz-Jobs magic in fully 128K glory. The app includes a note taker and calculator stuffed into a package that harkens back to the days of the original Macintosh.

Created by Salem-based programmer David T Green, the app costs $3.99 an is available now.

“My main inspiration came when I was playing around with System 6 in Mini VMac a few months ago and noted that the flat colors and shapes of the older OS had a lot in common with the design of modern mobile apps such as LetterPress, and Microsofts Metro style apps. From there I just felt it would be incredibly fun to have some simple little apps that reproduced the feel of the old desk accessories,” said Green.

While it’s lean on features, it definitely puts the iPhone screen to good use with large, chunky Chicago-style fonts and enough pixellated buttons to choke a Wild Eep. “There is no support for bit mapped fonts in iOS so I had to hand make a custom font that matches the font used on the original Mac pixel for pixel,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s fun to work within such limited visual constraints.”

[Thanks, Michael!]

The saga of PeopleBrowsr vs. Twitter appears to have come to a close, AllThingsD reports. Last November, PeopleBrowsr took Twitter to court after the company had informed them that they’d be losing access to its full firehose of data. This was a move happening with nearly all third-party developers, but PeopleBrowsr contested that its four-year long relationship with Twitter could not be cut off that easily.

After a somewhat astonishing public back and forth between the two companies, it sounds like the terms of the out of court settlement will be that PeopleBrowsr keeps firehose data until the end of the year, at which time it will shift over to one of Twitter’s approved data partners, Gnip, Topsy or DataSift.

A Twitter spokesperson issued the following statement to us:

We’re pleased to have this matter dismissed with prejudice, and look forward to PeopleBrowsr’s transition by the end of the year off of the Firehose to join the ecosystem of developers utilizing Twitter data via our reseller partnerships.

While it’s not a win, it is the close of a case that kicked up dust from developers, some seeing PeopleBrowsr as fighting for the “little guys” who were slowly losing the access to Twitter’s data that they once enjoyed. This was not the case though, as PeopleBrowsr’s products, namely Kred, relies on this data to function. Basically, it had been paying Twitter $1M a year to keep their business going. That’s not little. There’s no word on what it will have to eventually pay someone like Gnip for the same access.

A spokesperson from PeopleBrowsr says that it’s “business as usual” now. Good, because it got really ugly there for a while.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

EA, the game maker in the midst of a big transition from the console era of gaming to the free-to-play world, confirmed widespread reports of layoffs today. The company did not disclose the size of the layoffs, but several other outlets are reporting either hundreds of layoffs or figures that are as high as 10 percent.

The downsizing, which comes on the heels of other layoffs in Montreal and Los Angeles earlier this year, is happening as EA is expected to have a weak earnings report on May 7. EA CEO John Riccitiello recently stepped down over “shortcomings” in the company’s financial performance for the most recent quarter after a six-year stint at the helm of the company.

We have an internal memo from executive chairman Larry Probst, which sheds light on some of the changes.

Core marketing functions, which were spread out between EA’s five different labels, are getting consolidated under COO Peter Moore. Origin, EA’s online distribution platform, is moving under EA’s President of Labels, Frank Gibeau, who is considered one of the few plausible internal candidates for taking EA’s helm once the CEO search is over.

Here’s Probst:

As we begin the new fiscal year, I want to provide you with a brief update on some important changes to our organization. As Executive Chairman, my focus is to ensure EA is delivering high quality games and services to our consumers, while helping the executive team develop a FY14 operating plan that drives growth, rationalizes headcount and controls costs.

In recent weeks, the executive team has been tasked with evaluating every area of our business to establish a clear set of priorities, and a more efficient organizational structure. This process has led to some difficult decisions about the number of people and locations needed to achieve our goals.

The workforce reductions which we communicated in the last two weeks represent the majority of our planned personnel actions. We are extremely grateful for the contributions made by each of these individuals – they will be missed by their colleagues and friends at EA.

We are also taking action to streamline our organization, including changes in two key areas:

· Core marketing functions have been consolidated under our COO, Peter Moore. The combined group will bring together our Label marketing teams, Global Acquisition Marketing and Marketing Analytics into one multi-talented team under Todd Sitrin’s leadership. The development and marketing teams will continue to work as cohesive units, driving clear and consistent messaging and consumer engagement for each of our franchises.

· Origin will move into Frank Gibeau’s Labels organization. Andrew Wilson will take on the leadership of Origin, working with CJ Prober and the team to create more value and an enhanced entertainment experience for our consumers.

Change is sometimes difficult, but essential. The adjustments we are making will put us in the best position to build great games and services, deliver them more efficiently to consumers, and demonstrate to players around the world why they should spend their time with us.

EA is a great company, with talented and hard-working teams, a strong portfolio of products and an extremely bright future.

Thank you all for your dedication and commitment to our long term success!

Google’s ambitious Glass display is still a ways off from its public release, but it looks like those newly-minted Glass Explorers now have something else to do besides taking first-person photos. The New York Times just pulled back the curtain on its own Glass-friendly app today, which makes it the first installable third-party app available for the ambitious headset (Path was technically the first third-party app, but it’s preloaded on early versions of the device).

It’s no surprise to see the Grey Lady embrace Glass so enthusiastically — Google developer advocate Timothy Jordan first showed off an early version of the New York Times Glass app at SXSW 2013 in Austin (you can see his full talk here), which pipes new news and headlines to the head-mounted display at regular intervals. Navigating through that stream of news seemed easy enough: a quick tilt of the head would allow the user to sift through photos and full articles as well.

Setting up the app is a simple process — clicking on the link above asks for access to your Google account:

Once that’s all done, Glass can occasionally chime in by reading headlines in your ear, but the app is also capable of reading off brief article summaries too. All told it seems like a very neat, (if strangely intrusive way) to consume your daily dose of news, and other companies have already pledged to craft their own Glass experiences — Path and the New York Times are a given, but Evernote and supposedly even Twitter are working on apps for Google’s daring device.

Last summer, New York-based hybrid investor / incubator / holding company thing Betaworks acquired social news site Digg and relaunched it soon after, hoping to bring back some of its mojo in the process. Nine months later, Betaworks has acquired another news-oriented application, this time bringing Marco Arment’s popular story-saving app Instapaper into the fold.

In an email, Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick remarked that the acquisition clarifies Betaworks’ role as a company that builds and operates multiple products, rather than just as an incubation space for new ideas which eventually got spun out. And, more importantly, with Instapaper’s purchase model, it makes Betaworks into a company that actually makes money.

“Starting 14 months ago I began to move Betaworks into being an operating company,” Borthwick wrote. “In our first three years we were a factory for building companies, we built them and spun them out, hired CEO’s and got other people to fund them. 14 months ago I paid our investors all their money back and started making the shift to operating company.”

As part of the transition, Betaworks has been building around the social reading an discovery space. With the acquisition of Instapaper, Betaworks is adding even more tools for saving — and sharing — news that is important to readers. Borthwick wrote that Instapaper will be a “perfect fit” with Digg and its forthcoming Digg Reader, which is being positioned as a sort of Google Reader replacement.

In a blog post, meanwhile, Instapaper founder Marco Arment said that he was passing on responsibility to Betaworks so that he could “try other apps and creative projects.” In looking for a new home, he wanted Instapaper to find a place where it could be fully staffed and grown.

With that in mind, the deal was structured to ensure the health and longevity of Instapaper, “with incentives to keep it going well into the future.” Arment said he will “continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operation, expand its staff, and develops it further.”

Digg, for its part, seems to have benefitted from the change in ownership: It’s reportedly grown 93 percent over the last 12 months, since being relaunched under Betaworks management. Adding Instapaper to its existing roster of social reading and discovery products could help to advance its aim of capturing that market.

Borthwick will be with us at Disrupt NY 2013 next week, and will no doubt have a lot to say about the acquisition and the future direction of Betaworks. Buy tickets here!

While Pinterest is still rolling out its brand new look to users, it decided to listen to some feedback along the way and make some tweaks.

Since the site relies heavily, or completely, on its users pinning things to boards like crazy, some features that were dropped from the new design were re-added due to popular demand.

One of the features that caused the community to clammer the most was “Pinned By,” which let people see who originally pinned an item. This was a way to discover new people to follow and Pinterest has brought it back:

Additionally, the mentioning friends feature using an @ symbol has returned, yet another way to discover new people to follow. Notice a trend here? It seems like the new design was limiting users on how they could find new friends and boards to interact with. The company says that finding friends from Twitter and Facebook that are on Pinterest is back, too.

Other than the features that were reintroduced, Pinterest has improved its search functionality by adding auto-suggest, something that helps people out when looking for things. This has been a popular feature on Google’s search product, making the experience way less aggravating than looking at an empty white box for minutes:

Along with search, Pinterest has moved your recent activity notifications, including older ones, to the top right corner, another move that could increase engagement. Things that the company are thinking on and might roll out soon are rearranging pins and creating a board within a board. Let’s call that feature “Boardception.” Still, it’s clear that remaining true to the original experience tops all new bells and whistles.

Other social sites like Twitter and Facebook tend to roll out features slowly, getting instant feedback from people along the way before things are released to the masses. By letting users opt-in to trying out the new look, Pinterest gets beta testers who are ready, willing and able to voice their complaints, since that’s what people end up voicing anyways.

If you’re still rocking the old design on Pinterest, just click “Get it now” after you log in: